Social media has grown to become an essential and efficient marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. If done effectively, social media in eye care can be used to market to the different generations in a community and attract new patients through well crafted, timely posts.

Today, we’ll share some tips to make the most out of the social media efforts in your optometric practice.

Best Practices For Using Social Media In Eye Care

Select Your Social Platforms

Depending on your patient demographics, your audience may be spread across multiple social media platforms. However, while your patients may have accounts for multiple platforms, it is possible that they are only active on a few. Because managing an active social media presence on multiple platforms can be time-consuming, you need to identify where your audience is most active on social media so you can utilize your resources to focus on that platform.

Tailor Each Post

Without content, your social media efforts will remain ineffective. The content you post on each platform has to be relevant to your audience and to that platform. Each platform has it’s own purpose and character requirements, for this reason, each post must be tailored to the platform. For example, one article from Sprout Social suggests that these are the ideal length of posts on each social media platform:

• Facebook: 40-80 characters
• Twitter: 71-100 characters 
• LinkedIn: 50-100 characters

Twitter recently announced that it is increasing the character limit of a tweet to 280 characters for most users.

Post At The Right Time

Similar to how each platform has an ideal message length, social media experts also recommend the best times each post should be published to optimize engagement for your audience. CoSchedule notes in this article that the best days and times to post on each social network are:

• Facebook: Posts later in the week have the highest engagement with 9 a.m., 1 p.m., and 3 p.m. being the best times to post.
• Twitter: It’s suggested that Wednesdays around 12 p.m. and between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. are the best times to post on Twitter.
• LinkedIn: If your optometric practice uses LinkedIn, consider posting midweek (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) from 5—6 p.m.

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